GoDaddy screwed me. Back online soon.
GoDaddy hit me with a $900 charge for data transfer overage last month. No warning. They charge $29 for 500GB of transfer per month, and then jack it up to $6/GB for overage transfer. With no warning. They were willing to charge me only $450 for the overage, but not willing to go lower because I could have seen the overage through their exceedingly cumbersome administration console. I was supposed to notice that bandwidth usage had double for the last week of my month for that, and remember that my month ends on the 18th.
I can see that the server went over the bandwidth limit. I can accept that I should pay more for the month. The problems I have with this situation are:
A. $6/GB is an unreasonable rate for overage which $0.058 is the base pre-paid rate;
B. GoDaddy does not make it clear to customers that the overage rate is more than one hundred times the base rate;
C. GoDaddy does not warn of overage before the fact, they expect users to constantly check through GoDaddy’s administration console (which is junk) to make sure everything is fine (which is junk);
D. GoDaddy does not pre-authorization the overage;
E. GoDaddy does not provide any way to make the prepaid bandwidth a cap for the month, they just start charging the overage rate.
So, I cancelled my servers.
I apologize for the inconvenience. Please feel free to contact GoDaddy.com and tell them how screwed up their business is and that their handling of MacDesktops is preventing you from using their services. The billing manager’s name is Mark Danzan. If you talk to him and he tries to tell you that their billing model is like a cell phone plan, please make sure you sympathize mention that you too have a cell phone plan which charges $30/month for 500 minutes and charges $6/min thereafter! Or feel free to contact me and tell me how ridiculous I’m being.
I am working on another hosting arrangement for the future. In the meantime, I am very close to having the site up and running on my home servers, with images spread across two DSL lines.
I was hit by the same scheme by GoDaddy.com.
They wanted to charge USD$359 onto my credit card immediately on MODNAY!
Luckily my card had expired. I contacted support to ask why, after four days later, I decide
to call them instead.
Now being FRIDAY, the bill has now jumped to USD$780!!!!!! I told them why didn’t they just
‘roll over’ my next month’s allocation? They said it was because of the bill they won’t
roll over until it’s paid. So even though I’ve already paid for the rest of the year, they
wont use that, instead, will continue to charge me until I pay the bill!!
Ryan, what did you end up doing in the end? Did you end up paying them? I’m tempted NOT to as
they totally screwed me over with a USD$5.99 per 1 GIG over the limit as well as a $9.99
for a month’s hosting?
Comment by superfishnz — 10 August 2006 @ 2:06 am
Superfishnz,
Sorry to hear you had a similar problem. I refused to pay the overage they were attempting to charge, and immediately cancelled the servers. They refunded everything for the unused months for which I had pre-paid. GoDaddy ended up eating the disputed charges, and lost me as a customer. Their business model is based upon deception.
One caveat though. If you need to retrieve anything from your GoDaddy account, make sure you do so before you call them to cancel. Once I made the call, my account was terminated within 2 hours.
Post GoDaddy, I moved MacDesktops onto my home DSL line until I received generous offers from ImportGSM and VisualSeed to provide servers. One of my friends and former colleagues recommended DreamHost. They weren’t offering enough bandwidth for me at the time, but they do now.
Good luck,
Ryan
Comment by Ryan Walker — 10 August 2006 @ 9:49 am